COMMENTARY Draconian prison sentences meted out under Cuba's cyber-sedition laws should beckon support for the private sector's more subtle cyber-subversion — including independent video games.
Back in 2018, when Cuba’s fossilized regime finally ceded real, household internet access to the island’s 11 million web-starved inhabitants, we all knew it had the potential for new expression and old repression.
It would give Cubans the information as well as the voice they’d never known under six decades of communist rule. But it would also give communist rule another excuse for hauling Cubans behind bars if they exercised that information and voice too freely.
The most recent victim of that Janus-faced phenomenon is Mayelín Rodríguez Prado, a 23-year-old mother in Nuevitas, Cuba. She was just sentenced to 15 years in prison for “sedition” and spreading “enemy propaganda.” Rodríguez’s “crime”? Back in the summer of 2022 she uploaded videos of anti-government protests in her hometown to social media.
A dozen other Nuevitas protesters were also thrown in prison for violating the country’s new “cyberterrorism” laws. The panicked Cuban regime’s been decreeing those left and right these days so it can hammer the Wi-Fi genies when they wander too far from the bottle.
As those spirits did in 2021 — when a social media wildfire brought thousands of Cubans, fed up with shortages of basic consumer goods and basic human rights, into the streets for unprecedented demonstrations. Some 700 of them were later sentenced to as many as 20 years, many for cyberspace “felonies.”
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Brian Nichols, the State Department’s western hemisphere chief, called the Nuevitas sentences “outrageous” and “unconscionable.” And he’s spot-on.
But Nichols could also point to a rare bit of good techno-sphere news coming out of Cuba in recent weeks. And he could hold it up as a reason not only to feel hopeful about the web effect there — but to counter the absurd dogmatic line being pushed in Miami and Washington D.C. this year that all of the island’s new private entrepreneurs are insidious “fronts” for the regime.
I’m referring to a video game called Saviorless — Cuba’s first independent video game.
Saviorless is the brainchild of one of those new Cuban capitalists, 43-year-old Josuhe Pagliery, a savvy artist and tech go-getter whose private business, Empty Head Games, has spent a decade overcoming every financial, bureaucratic and cyber obstacle his country can throw at a good idea.
As a fable, Saviorless is a study in subverting the narrative of the Cuban Revolution. Its mysteries are a way for the game to get past Cuban censors.Luis Aguasvivas
When I first profiled Pagliery in 2016 — just days after Cuban dictator Fidel Castro had died — he was both chafing and cheering.
Crowdfunding
Chafing because, in those days before Cuba’s universal internet upgrade, the roaring river of programming components needed to build a video game had to be downloaded drop-by-drop while sitting in one of Havana’s public Wi-Fi hotspots, using prehistoric online access cards.
But cheering because U.S. tech start-up mentors impressed by Pagliery’s 2D project had just connected Empty Head Games to international crowdfunding — the first time a Cuban entrepreneur had ever raised cash that way.
Saviorless, which takes players on a compelling if ultimately tragic hero’s quest in a gothic world, is now being launched outside Cuba to video-game community applause.
The fantasy, though, is hardly frivolous. Just as important is what Saviorless can convey inside Cuba. It’s not as overt as uploading street protests to X. But it bears a covertly subversive quality.
First, of course, is the fact that it was created free of state control, liberated from the stultifying, Young Communist Pioneer content of official Cuban video gaming. What’s more, its story arc — an exploration of how power corrupts and betrays — is being decoded by video game critics as a veiled jab at Cuba’s dictatorship.
“As a fable,” Luis Aguasvivas writes for the online magazine PopMatters, “Saviorless...[is] a study in subverting the narrative of the Cuban Revolution.”
“The mysteries in the story,” Aguasvivas suggests, “are a way for the game’s developers to get past the Cuban censors.”
That hardly smacks of a “front” for the regime — which is how Cuban exile hardliners now label the entirety of Cuba’s fledgling private sector, whose U.S. support they’re blocking.
They’re demonizing it because any private sector success threatens their sacred narrative — that Cuba’s democratization can come only via the unconditional, overnight overthrow of the regime, and not through the more engaged, more realistic undermining of that regime.
But it’s the former scenario — after 65 years of failure — that feels like the video game fantasy.
